Superbug link to 800 patient deaths

The deaths of 800 patients in England and Wales in 2002 have been linked to the hospital superbug MRSA. The figure is double that of four years ago and a 15-fold increase since 1993.

MRSA was the underlying cause of death in 248 cases and a contributory factor in hundreds more, the government's Health Protection Agency said yesterday.

In 1993 only 51 deaths in England and Wales were linked to Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium's full name, rising to 412 in 1998. Laboratory reports of blood poisoning caused by MRSA increased by more than 25 times from 210 to 5,309, in less than a decade.

Ministers in England are already naming and shaming hospitals with the poorest records for MRSA infection. Rates of infection in the worst hospitals are seven times higher than in the best. Every NHS trust has been told it must have a senior manager for infection control. There have also been campaigns stressing the value of hand-washing, and disinfecting wards.

Other Staphylococcus aureus infections were said to be an underlying cause of death in 394 people.

Previous estimates have suggested that in all there could be 100,000 hospital-acquired infections each year with 5,000 people dying as a result, costing the NHS as much as £1bn. The MRSA death toll, calculated by the HPA and the Office for National Statistics, comes from studying death certificates.

Staphylococcus is found on the skins and noses of about a third of healthy people but it can cause severe infection if it enters the bodies of patients during operations or the fitting of drips and catheters.

Some of the increase may be attributed to better surveillance, but ministers believe repeated warnings to hospital staff to improve infection controls have not paid dividends.

Georgia Duckworth, an expert on MRSA at the HPA, said: "It is difficult to establish whether MRSA is the underlying cause of a patient's death or just a contributory factor because the majority of infections are in people who are very sick, and we don't know if they would have died as a result of their underlying illness or whether they had MRSA. This research does show, however, that MRSA is making an increasing contribution to illness and mortality."

Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, said preventing and reducing infections was a top priority. "We share this problem with other countries, but we are determined to be up with the best in tackling it," he said.

Paul Burstow, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, called the figures "shocking and unacceptable".

A study in today's Lancet medical journal by researchers at Hammersmith hospital and Imperial College, London, suggests people from the poorest backgrounds are seven times more likely to get post-operative MRSA infection than people from more affluent groups.